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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#621

Post by weatherlite »

linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#622

Post by cableshaft »

mnsc wrote: post #458
cableshaft wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get paid for making NES games today. You just have to crowdfund it. This one raised over $180,000 just four years ago, for example: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma... This one raised $32k just this past December: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1222722105/full-quiet-a... Another that raised $49k: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacatstudios/ronius-t... $55k: http…

I don't think the person in the dm would have liked this answer. "if you build a career in developing plumbing and glue code, in the future you could have a successful Kickstarter where nostalgic developers buy your curiosities"

I think you mean nostalgic gamers, not developers. They're not getting that much money just from other developers.

But why not? There are quite a few businesses that basically run off of Kickstarter. Like 30% of the board game industry nowadays fund most or all of their prints runs off Kickstarter, including some of the largest board game publishers, like CMON, Awaken Realms, AEG, Eagle-Gryphon, Garphill, Greater Than Games, Renegade, Portal and Queen Games (lots more publishers than this too).

https://www.dicebreaker.com/companies/kickstarter/news/table...

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#625

Post by ghaff »

noodlesUK wrote: post #605
rukuu001 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny - also COBOL was intended for the 'business' community to write their own programs. Even funnier - we've already lived through the great 'software development adoption' by business and hardly noticed, except some of us got work out of it. A lot of small businesses (legal practices and accountancies were particular suspects) grabbed MS Access with both hands and went wild in the 90s/early 2000s. Timesheets and o…

I’m quite sad there isn’t anything like access these days. I feel like I see fairly clever solutions for things being built in excel, but they can’t scale very well to multiple users. For a lot of processes something like Access would be great for bridging the gap.

My oversimplified observation is that, Adobe products at the high-end notwithstanding, MS Office basically crystallized what was a mainstream office productivity suite now that companies weren't buying one-off products. Rather than buying a low-end/midrange desktop publishing program, they made it work with Word. Rather than using a low-end database (of which there were many), the made do with Excel.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#626

Post by adnmcq999 »

linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

well that’s weirdly graphic

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#627

Post by ilaksh »

nabla9 wrote: post #87

"programmer" is not single thing. Software jobs can be divided into expert jobs and laborer jobs. Even if the demand for "code monkeys" decreases, demand for much smaller group of software engineers with masters or PhD (equivalent) and good mathematical skills probably increases. It's a dynamic process where two forces find a equilibrium. >Automation, which enables capital to replace labor in tasks it was previously…

Nonsense. You know how many masters and PhDs NLP and computer vision knowledge is now almost entirely irrelevant for most businesses now that any uneducated person like me can access GPT-4 with an API call? Pretty much all of them. And within a year or two of years open source models will be available to run onsite for the ones that have security issues.

The best new models are so powerful and general that you literally don't have to train them for any specific task. Just give them some context.

ChatGPT couldn't count. GPT-4 gets a high score on a math SAT.

You and your friends will be easily replaceable with AI. Quite possibly already with GPT-4. If not, certainly we should anticipate within 3 years.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#628

Post by jghn »

gavinray wrote: post #612
linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

You might also consider buying your son a Github Copilot license, it's $10/mo and I would easily pay $50/mo for the value it provides.

How does it compare to ChatGPT in terms of code quality?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#629

Post by williamcotton »

weatherlite wrote: post #621
linsomniac wrote: post #584

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality". Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want…

How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?

How much better would software be if a team of five individuals could produce the same output as a team of 500 individuals?

How much terrible software is out there? How much terrible FOSS software is out there?

How much amazing and humanistic software could be created if the costs for production were drastically reduced and the demands of the market were less of a factor?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#630

Post by weatherlite »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

Still, this will affect senior people, junior people, salaries, everything. And not just in programming. Yes jobs will still be there - but how many? how much will they pay compared to now? We don't know yet but whatever it is I doubt it will be like today.
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